The woman of to-morrow

by Helen M. Winslow

The enlargement of our sympathies and of our general moral and spiritual outlook as expressed in our ideals of conduct and life.

The housekeeper of the future, too, will know how to make the best use of her time and understand how to save her strength. She will discriminate between what is necessary work and what unnecessary. It is inevitable that our twentieth century women will make good wives. They will understand their husbands’ business and regulate their expenditures accordingly. At the table the talk will not be limited to complaints about servants and gossip about friends and neighbors, but topics of the day will be intelligently discussed, and the husband will receive the intelligent coöperation of his wife in all his affairs.

We are all interested in public health and sanitation, in the prevention of the spread of disease, in the lowering of the death rate, in immunity from exposure to disease, in the protection of the sources of our water supply, of our milk supply and of the meat diet offered in our markets. In all of these things women are by nature and experience better qualified to lead than men, and not until women do undertake their full share of such social work will our community standards of health and cleanliness compare with those that woman has evolved in the home, and will those of the home be still further improved. Still, the average workingman’s cottage to-day is in a better sanitary condition than the palace of the rich was fifty years ago, and the ordinary artisan’s family lives with more consideration for the rules of hygiene. This is, of course, due to the development of science, but it is also due to the awakening of womankind. But in no other way is woman heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time than in her motherhood. With all that child study has discovered, with all the experience of her mother and grandmother to draw from, with all the discoveries of science at her womanhood, and with a fuller sense of her moral responsibility than ever before, good mothers are inevitable.

God designed women primarily to be mothers of the race, and all the talk of the ultra reformer, all the cryings of pessimists, will not change this unalterable fact. In this connection I wish to second most heartily the wish uttered recently by a prominent Western woman of wide experience:

“I wish every childless home might be filled with homeless little children who lack a father’s loving care and a mother’s fond devotion—that immortal souls that are perishing in helplessness, want and vice might be rescued and loved and trained to virtue. On this beautiful earth there should never be a homeless child, there should not be so many foundlings’ homes and orphan asylums, as beautiful as those charities are! The most precious gift of God, a fresh and innocent soul to love, to rear and train for usefulness, is not given to every woman, but there is none among us so busy, so burdened by care or lack of means, who would not be the better for such an angel ministrant in her home, for such a check upon the self-absorption or selfishness that men and women grow into without the loving pranks and clinging caresses of innocent little children.

“Alas! for the starved heart of a woman who expends all her mother love and tenderness upon a pampered pug or an elongated dachshund.

“Alas! for the stifled soul who, for love of ease, can pass by unheeding the need of Christ’s little ones who are denied by circumstances the right to be well born and well bred. How many luxurious mansions never hear the music of childhood’s voices! How many homes of comparative comfort in the middle classes never resound with the tread of childish feet, or know the gladness of the trusting love of a little child, sweetest of earthly joy! Is it a risk to take an alien child or introduce strange blood into the family which may produce ingratitude or disobedience? One may meet the same faults in their own children who develop strange traits of character from long-forgotten ancestors, or wring a parent’s heart with unkindness, indifference or neglect. I would say, take the risk, leaving the issues to God, and do your duty faithfully for some other mother’s darling, as faithfully and even more so than if your own, and your later years will be brightened and blessed by grateful affection and devoted filial care.”

And if this were done the problems of the poor and the degeneracy of the race would be far on toward solution.

Then let us be brave women and true, with no taint of unfairness or dishonor in our methods or ambitions, but the resolve that we who have been privileged to be alive to-day, and privileged to march with the great army of those who serve, will strive to share what we possess, whether of wealth, intellect or affection, with those who are our sisters in God’s family.

Let us be charitable, believing in the sisterhood of women. Thoughts are things according to the New Thought, and the law of attraction will bring just what we desire, whether we think charitable, loving thoughts or the reverse.